While interactive multimedia animation is a very
compelling medium, few people are able to express themselves in it. There are
too many low-level details that have to do not with the desired content,
e.g.,
shapes, appearance and behavior, but rather how to get a computer to present
the content. For instance, behaviors like motion and growth are generally
gradual, continuous phenomena. Moreover, many such behaviors go on
simultaneously. Computers, on the other hand, cannot directly accommodate
either of these basic properties, because they do their work in discrete steps
rather than continuously, and they only do one thing at a time. Graphics
programmers have to spend much of their effort bridging the gap between what
an animation is and how to present it on a computer.

We propose that this situation can be improved by a
change of language, and present Fran, synthesized by complementing an
existing declarative host language, Haskell, with an embedded domain-specific
vocabulary for modeled animation. As demonstrated in a collection of
examples, the resulting animation descriptions are not only relatively easy to
write, but also highly composable.

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